Elon Musk, controversially charged with remaking government for President Donald Trump, said Friday he would rehire a young member of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency after the man resigned Thursday over racist social media posts.
Musk’s move came after Vice President JD Vance called in a social media post for 25-year-old Marko Elez, who posted racist statements on social media as recently as September, to be brought back into DOGE.
Using a salute emoji, Musk responded to Vance’s post on X, saying, “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Elez was one of a team of young technology workers, many connected to the Bay Area, who are penetrating government agencies amid billionaire presidential adviser Musk’s crusade to slash federal spending and purge programs and employees linked to diversity efforts.
According to a Wednesday federal court filing in a lawsuit by labor groups against the U.S. Treasury Department over DOGE’s access to sensitive information, Elez is an engineer who has worked at Musk’s San Francisco company X, and at the SpaceX rocket company based in southern California, which Musk leads as CEO.
Elez resigned Thursday after the Wall Street Journal asked the White House about posts on a social media account linked to him, including a July statement that “I was racist before it was cool,” the newspaper reported.
Posts from September included one saying, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and another stating, “Normalize Indian hate,” in response to a post about people of Indian heritage in Silicon Valley, the paper reported.
On Friday, responding to an online poll posted on X by Musk, asking whether to “bring back” the DOGE worker “who made inappropriate statements,” Vance posted in favor of the rehiring, suggesting Elez’s posts did not make him a bad person.
“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance wrote. “So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
Silicon Valley Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna responded to Vance’s post with a reference to his own Indian heritage and Vance’s marriage to a woman whose parents are Indian immigrants, with whom he has three children.
“Are you going to tell him to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire?” Khanna, a father of two, asked Vance on X. “Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”
Elez worked on artificial intelligence at X, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The work of Elez and others at DOGE, an unofficial entity created via an executive order by President Donald Trump, has drawn fury from Democrats and charges that it is illegally accessing the private data of millions of Americans, and violating the Constitution by taking over powers held only by Congress.
So far, it appears Musk’s group have accessed data and systems in the U.S. Treasury Department, General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management, and the Agency for International Development, a department Trump said Friday should be shut down. A judge on Friday was expected to consider a request by labor unions that DOGE be blocked from accessing Labor Department systems and data, which include identities of workers filing labor complaints and “information regarding investigations of Mr. Musk’s corporate interests.”
Lawyers for the Labor Department and DOGE countered that the unions have failed to show they would be harmed by DOGE’s work, which they acknowledged had involved three DOGE workers being “detailed” to the Labor Department, who they said are “required to comply with rules and regulations governing privacy and data access that apply to them.”
Musk, selected by Trump to head DOGE, claimed Wednesday that his team is operating legally as the former U.S. Digital Service — created by former President Barack Obama — which Trump’s order renamed the U.S. DOGE Service.
The CEO, who is the world’s richest man, claimed this week without providing evidence that a quarter of U.S. government spending is wasteful or fraudulent.
An order from the judge in the Washington, D.C. federal court lawsuit highlighted the role of Elez in accessing Treasury Department data, as well as that of Tom Krause, CEO of Cupertino cloud-computing firm Cloud Software Group. Both were said in the order to be special government employees, temporary positions granted by the White House.
The order, on the same day Elez resigned from DOGE, granted Elez and Krause continued access to Treasury data on payments and payment systems but said they could not alter any information. Democratic U.S. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, in a letter Friday to the Treasury Department — which facilitates the vast majority of federal payments, more than $6 trillion a year — claimed Elez likely had the ability to rewrite the code in two key Treasury payment systems for at least several days this month.
Elez and Krause could not be reached for comment Friday.
Krause in an interview in May with a consulting firm said he grew up in the Bay Area. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton University in 2000, and went on to work in venture capital investing in San Francisco and Palo Alto, before taking business development jobs for semiconductor companies, then moving up the corporate ladder at Palo Alto semiconductor firm Broadcom to become its president, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In late 2022, Krause was named chief executive at Cloud Software Group, which owns software companies Citrix and TIBCO. A visit to the Citrix and TIBCO teams in India had, he said in a LinkedIn post, left him “more energized than ever.”
